Ask my kids what they think of their downtown and you’ll get an honest answer in about four seconds. They won’t mention foot traffic or vacancy rates. They’ll tell you if there are any good cafes to hang out at with their friends, whether there are some decent clothing stores, and whose parents they last saw on Main Street.

It’s a different audit to the one most placemaking strategies run, but it’s arguably the one that matters most over time. Downtown revitalization efforts are typically managed by a board of more established, older place leaders. Yet if a program doesn’t speak to the people who’ll inherit our downtowns and cities, it risks becoming a program without a legacy.

So here’s the uncomfortable question: are we building these programs for the downtown as it is, or for the downtown as the next generation will need it to be? Those aren’t always the same project.

One version is measured against how a place is performing today, presentable streets, occupied storefronts, foot traffic to drive trade. The other is measured in something much harder to put in a slide deck. Do young people feel empowered? Can they access opportunities? Do they grow up with a feeling that the place is theirs to shape rather than something being done to, or for, them?

These questions are more important now than ever. Telling someone in their late teens or early twenties simply to “shop local” rings hollow when they have little to no chance of owning a home in the same place they live, or opening a storefront of their own. Young people today are dealing with real economic pressures, and a lot of them have quietly concluded that nobody with any power is looking out for them.

Which is why we need to address this, and fast. The American Planning Association has spent years building out resources on engaging youth in planning, an implicit acknowledgment that downtowns, neighborhoods and cities have historically left young people out of decisions that shape the places they grow up in. And the proof of what happens when you don’t just consult young people but actually hand them the keys already exists. Boston’s Youth Lead the Change, the first youth-driven participatory budgeting process in North America, gives residents aged 14 to 25 direct control of $1 million in city capital funding every year, with young people pitching, refining and voting on the projects themselves. Over a decade in, it has funded everything from school cooling upgrades to neighborhood Wi-Fi expansion, and it has done more to build civic trust among young Bostonians than any awareness campaign could. The ingredients for doing this properly already exist. What’s missing, more often than not, is the will to hand over something with real stakes attached.

As place leaders, we need to think creatively about what we can do to give young people a hand up. We actually need to give them the responsibility to manage and spend part of the placemaking budget. It’s not good enough to just allocate funds for a new skate park and then move on to the next agenda item. Where are the pop-up shop schemes, the budget for youth-led events, the heritage tours built through digital workshops, the local mentorship programs?

Civic pride shouldn’t just be about delivery today, but delivery tomorrow. It’s built through small, repeated community connections where people of all ages feel part of their town or city. Showing the next generation that they’re genuinely part of the decision making, even on something as small as what fills an empty storefront or what the summer events calendar looks like, says something a “shop local” poster never can.

To give a placemaking program a legacy, we have to ask something of the community in return. With young people especially, don’t just ask for their attention, ask for their participation.